Reevely: Ottawa's new central library site could be great if we don't cheap out

The selected site for a new central library in Ottawa, which will be a four-floor facility on 3.56 acres at 557 Wellington Street, near the intersection of Albert and Commissioner streets in LeBreton Flats.Julie Oliver / Postmedia

To make Ottawa’s plans for a new central library work, we’ll be counting on LeBreton Flats really coming alive. And on redevelopment in the northwest corner of Centretown. And on the library to encourage both. While being an urban bridge between the two neighbourhoods, over physically difficult terrain.

It’s asking a lot.

In a presentation Thursday afternoon, library staffers said 557 Wellington St., land just northwest of Albert Street and Bronson Avenue now used as a staging ground for excavating the light-rail tunnel, is the best place for a $168-million new temple of culture they’ll share with Library and Archives Canada.

As it happens, it’s the only one of 12 sites they studied that the city already owns. The library planners looked at 11 others in a rough east-west line from Bayview to the ByWard Market (though only seven were in the running for the joint project with Library and Archives). Over the past several months they inquired whether any of their owners wanted to do a development deal and none of them did.

But, say the planners, 557 Wellington is glorious in its own right. Part of the appeal is its striking location, the library’s planners said in revealing a 17-category scoring chart for each property. They rhapsodized about the views.

“Views from the site… are going to be very significant,” said consulting designer David Leinster, a Toronto expert who’s chair of Ottawa’s urban-design review panel for private proposals. “There’re going to be amazing views of the national-capital lands to the north.”

You’ll be able to see things from the library, and you’ll be able to see the library from those same things. The site is unlikely ever to have tall buildings looming over it, which means patrons can count on a lot of natural light — unlike the bunker that serves as a main-branch now. Which is good as far as it goes. But by definition a good view is not blocked by, you know, other stuff.

In fact, this isolation counted in the site’s favour. One quality the planners looked for was whether a given property “would serve as a catalyst and economic driver for Central Area development.” Four of the 12 properties got 100-per-cent scores on that count, including 557 Wellington.

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Another is whether “development of the new library facility (there) contributes to the establishment of a new civic focal point and civic identity” and yet another is whether it does the same for federal purposes — in other words, having nothing else of note around it is a positive. Only 557 Wellington got 100 per cent on that one.

The land is bounded by the escarpment at the north end of Bronson on its eastern edge and the old aqueduct along the northern edge. These are nice to look at. But then if you look south, there’s heavily trafficked Albert Street, some empty greenspace, and then a blank wall that forms the edge of Slater Street as it climbs the escarpment. Albert and Slater intersect with Bronson in a mess of pedestrian-hostile spaghetti lanes.

So the property’s hemmed in by a bluff, a moat, an interchange and a cleared field between two arterial roads. It’ll be highly defensible in the zombie apocalypse. But we aren’t building a fort.

Coun. Catherine McKenney, who’s also a library trustee, criticized the site as inaccessible. Being able to reach it is way more important than whether the view is nice from an upstairs window, she said. The property is close to transit, yes, but did anyone invite someone with a walker or a wheelchair to navigate that Albert Street hill? Nobody had, library manager Elaine Condos said.

The central libraries in Vancouver and in Halifax, the models for great modern Canadian libraries, are both on downtown city blocks surrounded by other buildings. Vancouver’s is on Robson Street and Halifax’s is on Spring Garden Road, streets there’s a good chance you’ve heard of even if you’ve never been to either city. Ottawa’s site is on Wellington Street but it’s the ghost part, the stretch that confuses visitors if they happen to be trying to find their way from downtown to Westboro.

The planners said they counted the number of households inside several circles surrounding the current main library and the new site — within 200 metres, 400 metres and so on — and found them pretty similar both now and in future projections. This is an iffy metric: the main library now is in a commercial district, readily reachable by a lot of downtown workers on lunch breaks or after work. The new site is not. Counting households doesn’t measure that.

McKenney and others argue the fix has been in for the city-owned site from the beginning. Whether that’s true or not, the location’s flaws don’t have to be fatal. In fact, it’s by overcoming such challenges that fine architecture and urban design come about. Greatness isn’t achieved by solving easy problems.

But make no mistake: if we build a central library at 557 Wellington, we’ll need everything about it to be brilliant.

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